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Productivity's Up, and What of It?

Although our productivity while engaged in ''cerebral tasks'' might not be increasing (''Working Better or Just Harder?'', Op-Ed, Feb. 14), that is a small part of the time spent on most knowledge-work projects. Gathering and organizing the information that our brains will be processing, wrestling the products of our minds into a usable form, and disseminating the newly created knowledge take up the bulk of our workdays.

Could any knowledge worker doubt that the tools of the information technology revolution -- from word processors and spreadsheets to Web search engines and e-mail -- have increased our productivity in these ancillary tasks?